Professor Tera Hunter, who teaches American history and African American studies at Princeton University, weighs in on the historical distortions enabled by Governor Ron DeSantis’s various educational legislations to make Florida the place where “woke goes to die.” 

In a recent article in Hammer and Hope, Professor Tera Hunter, who teaches American history and African American studies at Princeton University, weighs in on the historical distortions enabled by Governor Ron DeSantis’s various educational legislations to make Florida the place where “woke goes to die.” With the precision of her historian’s toolkit, Hunter carefully unpacks the subtleties missed when the revised curriculum depicting “slavery as a benign institution or a temporary way station that culminated in happy endings,” fails to grapple with the fact that “most enslaved people and their heirs never escaped perpetual life terms in a system that lasted nearly two and a half centuries.” Professor Hunter underscores that rather than a mere historical blip, slavery’s long-term impact includes “persistent racial disparities in education, health care, employment, and the criminal justice system — institutions that have been marred by racism from the slavery era to today.” 

Read full article here

 

During a 2018 symposium on Black Miami intellectuals convened at the University of Miami by Professor Donette Francis, Hunter reflected on her upbringing in Miami.

So how has Miami shaped my racial identity or my work as an intellectual? It is so deeply ingrained in who I am as a person that it is hard to say. It gave me a curiosity about history—both what I learned in school and what I learned in my community—and all the things that were left out. It made me appreciate a broader sense of what blackness represents. My extended family included people from various parts of the Diaspora, especially the Caribbean, and most especially the Bahamas. I can’t think of what it means to be black and not think of this polyglot city. My interests in women’s issues were piqued by observing the small and large ways women were often both in charge and also artificially subordinated because of their gender. I lived in a world in which I had all kinds of examples, role models, and mentors–many of them teachers–who nurtured me to think that I could be and do anything. I took all the gifts I was given and ran with them.

Read full essay here

 

Professor Tera Hunter, Chair of the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University. https://aas.princeton.edu/people/tera-w-hunter https://history.princeton.edu/people/tera-w-hunter